Country music legend Kitty Wells has passed away at the age of 92. According to family members, she passed away from complications of a stroke.
Kitty Wells
Wells is credited with breaking open country music for women. While female vocalists had occasionally had hits, it was Wells’ It Wasn’t Got That Made Honky Tonk Angels that gave a woman a number 1 country hit for the first time.
Kitty was born Ellen Deason in Nashville in 1919 and sang as a child while learning guitar from her father. As a teenager, she sang with her sisters on local radio stations as the Deacon Sisters and, at the age of 18, married Johnnie Wright who would eventually go on to stardom in the duo of Johnnie and Jack.
It was while performing with her husband that Deason took on the stage name of Kitty Wells and, in 1949, she signed with RCA. Even though she released a number of singles, none of them broke through into the Country top 40 and she was dropped from the label.
It was the decision to record a song for Decca records in 1952 for the $125 union scale payment that would change her life. The song was It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels and it shot to the top of the country chart, staying at number 1 for six weeks. The record, which was banned from some radio stations because of its content, even crossed to the pop charts, making it to number 28.
Angels started a string of 64 country top 40 hits for Wells that would last until 1968, including number 1’s with One by One (1954) and Heartbreak U.S.A. (1961). In 1969, she starred in the syndicated Kitty Wells/Johnnie Wright Show with her husband and their son, Bobby Wright who would go on to a couple of country hits.
Wells left Decca in 1973 and, the next year, joined Capricorn Records where she recorded the album Forever Young with the Allman Brothers. She continued to record into the 80’s and remained a big concert attraction well into her later years.
Wells was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1976 and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991.
Her husband Johnnie passed away last year at the age of 97. The couple had been married for 74 years.
